My Poetry: Cecil The Lion

Last week the world mourned

the death of a lion.

Coffee-break evangelists

spewed faux emotion

by re-posting skim read re-posts

while a thousand drowned

in Mediterranean seas.

Cadavers labeled “alien” and “illegal”

for crossing invisible borders

which separate the faiths

as accent or skin tone once did.

Corrupt headlines

dehumanise nations

deflect attention from

murderous foreign policies,

driving pale faced population

paranoid and scared

until it nullifies its apathy

of third world guilt

with monthly donations

to swollen belly charities.

In cold and grief blanketed lay-byes

a “promiscuous swarm of foreign peoples”

elicit less sympathy

than beasts hunted for pleasure

as they’re turned into animals

in makeshift jungles.

Does this signal

a decadent society in freefall?

Because we’d rather curse

about asylum seekers

stealing our first world reverie,

or hitchhiker traffic jams

delaying our daily commute,

even though we sleepwork

our way through the week

to return to the comfort of hypnotised solitude

in the company of loathed ones.

Last week tabloid front pages called

politicians to block borders,

like the world’s humanitarian crisis

needs a firmer jackboot to the jugular

like in ‘38 when leftwing headlines decried

the influx of Jews

as the icon of our aristocracy

goose-stepped through Europe,.

Now those same papers preach hatred

bemoan animalistic nature of desperation

then applaud it when shoppers

tussle for 40% off an Asda television.

Last week a lion died

and sympathisers cried

as a thousand migrants lost their lives

crossing continents

on blow up boats

while we drank and smoked and

sagely ‘liked’ posts to show we’re conscious,

until the new season

of The Great British Bake Off.

My Poetry: Notes on a Destiny, Ignored (The Fall of Icarus by Breughel)

In tired arms, a grandson rests

In the crook of a widow's embrace

Grief dressed like shadows

Turn the black room silent.


But outside that hushed room,

Which mists with tales studded

With joy and heartache,

Men laugh, 

Because they do not know,

A child is born, dumb to its fate,

The world moves a mile through space,

History keeps repeating,

Clones keep collecting pennies

From a dry well to buy false wishes, 

Too many too busy to look up.

And so nobody noticed the boy

Fall from the crystal blue sky,

Or see the ship which witnessed

History but still set sail for the horizon

To fulfill its destiny anyway;

Nobody saw the boy’s feathers

Melt from his thin white arms

Just before he fell;

Were you talking to the ploughman

About reaping what you'd sowed?

Were you blinded by your own 

Little history unfolding

And miss poor Icarus, the fool,

Reaching for the sun?

His death made mourners

Of rubberneckers

For a second a nation recoiled

Then returned to cups of tea and biscuits

Forgetting the death,

Because it did not belong to them.

I wrote this after watching a programme discussing Breughel’s Icarus painting (below) and reading W. H. Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts(1940)

http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/life/mu...ebeauxarts.htm

Further reading: 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus' by William Carlos Williams http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/l...pe-fall-icarus

Lines on Brueghel’s “Icarus” by Michael Hamburger http://timesflowstemmed.com/2014/06/...eghels-icarus/

My Poetry: La Petit Mort (A Little Death)

I’ve killed you again

My little peach,

But as your breath returns

Propped on an elbow,

Bare flesh bruised you moan:

I’m a terrible lover,

That tonight, was not as good

As that night in early Autumn

When, after picking fruit from hedges,

Your purple lips tasted

The type of little death 

Which makes martyrs of fools,,

Adulterers of the damned,

And perverts of the lonely.

That tonight,

Like an amateur origamist,

I was just lucky

To produce fireworks


From the folds of your flesh.

But by what means

Would you prefer to die next?

Maybe I’ll choke you

Like the teenage ingénue

From a Streaker Named Desire

Screaming ‘La Petite Mort’

In a high false crescendo.

Or perhaps your own hand

Is more to your taste,

Reenact the Karma Sutra

By candlewick.

Or maybe dress up

Pretend the bed is our stage,

You be the Nun, I’ll be the vicar

And we’ll reinvent original sin.